This is an idea I've had for a while, but I have been tinkering with a bit lately due to some work stuff. I want to write a wiki which is just a regular website, on a filesystem someplace, that you edit with Mozilla Composer.

(Yes, I'm aware that XSS is a concern here. Partially that's why I haven't written it yet.)

It would have the same "user filter" aspects as a regular Wiki (you'd have to have a user-agent that could do HTTP PUT and understand how to use it well enough to edit the pages) but it would be a lot easier to edit. I wonder what people would do with it.

The trust metric seems to have this problem with persistent inflation. Maybe all certifications should decay? That would enable people who were continuous participants in the community to maintain higher ratings than those who drifted in and out rarely.

The problem that I see with this is that it's difficult to make it from "contribution on external project" to "advogato certification", so you'd end up with the opposite problem (masters who hadn't posted in a month would find their certifications dropped to "apprentice" and have to get people to re-certify them first). This implies that we would need reputation management tools integrated with our source control or email tools.

Maybe not such a bad thing, but I'm not sure where to begin.

Update: Perhaps a fealty system is a way to improve the ratios of rankings here. In order to be a master, one must have a certain number of journeymen working with you; ditto with apprentices. That way a ranking can have some additional values associated with it that gives it strength: he is a master vs. he is my master.

MichaelCrawford: Let me first of all say that I sympathize
with your wife's dilemma. Software is in an abominable state these days, and
unexpected crashes are a fact of life for far too many people. My significant
other has had similar problems with Linux distributions in the past (and in
fact, just this afternoon I was helping her debug a graphics driver that was
broken by an automatic upgrade).

I know that you've been told a number of times to file bug reports, or to
contribute to the Mozilla project, and you seem averse to those suggestions for
various reasons. I can also sympathize with your limited resources.

However, your bugzilla and advogato postings belie a certain ignorance about
the economic model behind free/open source software. You regard yourself as an
informed user, outside the Mozilla organization, offering a bit of helpful
advice and concern for the quality of their product.

Here's the magic you're forgetting: no-one is outside the mozilla
organization. You are not an independent observer in the "linux" (by
which I take it you mean "free/open source software") quality continuum, you
are an actor in it. Apparently, you have a goal: to improve the quality and
advocate the use of this software. Perhaps you believe you can improve it by
agitating about the general concept of improvement on message boards. Based on
your Mozilla/IE comparison I take it that one of the milestones you hope that
you will reach is to improve the quality of free software to that of its
commercial counterparts.

Assuming that your logic is basically sound, I can work backwards from these
observations to 2 assumptions that I believe you must hold:

Quality of free software is lower than that of the proprietary
alternatives. (Therefore it is very important that it improve soon.)

The quality of free software is this low because the developers are not
aware that there is work to do, or they are wrongly prioritizing their work
because they do not care about quality. (Therefore it is important that you
tell people about it.)

The evidence for your first assumption is poorly presented, as it is
anecdotal, but I'll grant that this is at least possible. If this were the
only point of disagreement with the mozilla developers, I'm sure that they
would have simply said "Well, it works for me, so something else must be wrong
with your system.", and you would have easily agreed to disagree.

(Personally I find it hard to believe that IE crashes less for your
wife than mozilla. This has not been the case for me for the last year and a
half, at least.)

The problem with your second point is a lot worse. The developers of the
Mozilla project, much like yourself, are well aware that there are many, many
bugs that they need to fix. Your posting (and many like it) is, far from
encouraging quality to improve, is impeding any progress in the
mozilla project, in three ways.

You give a negative impression of the project's quality to other developers
in a completely biased way. Why is mozilla crashing for your wife? Is it the
mozilla developers who are incompetent? Have you fallen into the "Power User"
trap, modifying all of her system libraries to the point where you've caused
the problem yourself? Is there some other software package that's installed of
a version that Mozilla was not tested with? You're not helping your wife file
systematic bug reports so we don't know. All we know is "mozilla sucks", which
is unhelpful to anything but preventing people from wanting to work on mozilla.
This further limits the already-limited resources of the mozilla developers to
deal with quality problems.

Filing it as a bug report saps the time of existing mozilla developers who
could be addressing more serious bug reports. Many of the problems your wife
is having could already have been reported, but movement is
busy answering your vague report, so he won't be moving on to fix the
double-free() which is causing the crash. (If, indeed, the crash is mozilla's
fault, which as I said above, we don't know.)

Last, but most certainly not least, it saps the motivation of existing
Mozilla developers to do future work, by making them feel that their work is
unappreciated. User appreciation is a huge reason for working on open source
projects, and it's much rarer to get people who rave about how cool something
is than who complain about it. This isn't to say that we can't ever criticize
open-source projects, but it is important to balance that criticism and keep it
constructive. The open-source culture has long since evolved the etiquette
which says that all bug reports should be as technical as possible, to present
a developer with a challenge at the same time as a criticism.

I hope that this explanation has been more informative than the blithe "stop
submitting vague reports" that you have objected to. So please stop wasting
the Mozilla developers' time by promoting your LinuxQuality
project before it's done anything useful. (BTW, here's a bug report for you:
linuxquality.sunsite.dk doesn't even resolve, from here.) You are not having a
"a greater, positive effect on the community as a whole through the kind of
quality advocacy role that [you] play". I could have been writing unit tests,
but since your article was brought to my attention, I spent an hour trolling on
advogato instead.

PS: Mozilla rules, but when are you guys gonna support XHTML in composer,
huh? :-)

I really wish people would read the
certification guidelines before certifying others as "Master" willy-nilly.
To be honest, I think that if I deserve a certification as "Master" it's
borderline: it hinges upon the fact that Twisted Python is a
good open source project, "one that many people depend on, or one that stands
out in quality".

I appreciate my peers having given me this confidence, but it is sadly not
meaningful. A brief troll through the Advogato network revealed to me maybe 15
or 20 people with "Master" level certification who had made no contribution
whatsoever to the open source community, as far as I can tell. (No, a
sourceforge page that says "This project has not released any files" does not
qualify as a "contribution".)

If you read this, please take some time to lower any certifications you have
made that you know are inflated. If you feel you might offend people by
ranking them lower than the norm, look at it this way: the overall trust metric
may be hopelessly inflated, but your personal certification should
still be worth something. It is still quite a compliment, I think, to have
people thinking I am a Journeyer! After all, "Journeyers are the people who make free software happen."

The only reason my purple-y banner is of any value to me is because
raph ranks me as Master, and it's not because he's close to
the root: it's because he's someone who I do not know, and who has very few
Master rankings in a very long certification list.

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